Why Cloud Computing and Biofuels Make Sense

The Kbase will reveal relationships between microbes and environments

| August 22, 2011

The best part about the Kbase (knowledgebase) that a team of scientists from Argonne, Oak Ridge and Lawrence Berkley national labs, plus Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and others are working on is not that the work will help those scientists understand how microbes interact and live within their environments. As Doreen Ware, a CSHL professor working on the Kbase project says, the best part might instead be that the team will “focus on a specific assortment of plants and microbes that the energy department hopes to exploit to produce biofuels.”

The scientists want to create a system that can be used by the entire scientific community as a tool to understand the microbes and environments those microbes live in. The Kbase will be made available via cloud computing. Michael Schatz, another scientist from CSHL working on the project, sited Google as an example to explain the project as something that will enable anyone with internet access to tap into the information the team of scientists has recorded.